Folks provided vitamin D reduced their risk by more than half, researchers reported Sunday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans.\n<\/p>\n
But there’s a catch — people weren’t downing supplements on their own, but taking custom doses designed to optimize the vitamin D levels in their blood, researchers said.<\/p>\n
“We encourage people with heart disease to discuss vitamin D blood testing and targeted dosing with their health care professionals to meet their individual needs,” lead researcher Heidi May<\/a>, an epidemiologist at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City, said in a news release.\n<\/p>\n For the study, researchers recruited 630 adults with heart disease who were treated at Intermountain Medical Center between April 2017 and May 2023.<\/p>\n More than 85% of participants began the study with vitamin D levels below 40ng\/mL, a level many experts consider too low for best health, researchers said. Participants were around 63 years old on average and 48% had a previous heart attack.<\/p>\n One group was assigned to take tailored doses of vitamin D to bring their blood levels up, and the rest received care as normal.\n<\/p>\n “Previous clinical trial research on vitamin D tested the potential impact of the same vitamin D dose for all participants without checking their blood levels first,” May said. “We took a different approach. We checked each participant’s vitamin D levels at enrollment and throughout the study, and we adjusted their dose as needed to bring and maintain them in a range of 40-80 ng\/mL.”<\/p>\n In all, 107 major heart health problems occurred during the study period, including heart attack, heart failure, stroke or death. More than 18% occurred in the control group, versus under 16% in the vitamin D group.<\/p>\n People who got personalized vitamin D doses had a 52% lower heart attack risk than those in the control group, results showed.<\/p>\n About half of the participants in the vitamin D group required more than 5,000 IU each day to reach the target blood level – a dose more than six times the daily intake of 800 IU recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration<\/a> (FDA), researchers noted.<\/p>\n However, the benefit appeared restricted solely to heart attack. The vitamin D didn’t lower patients’ risk of death, heart failure or stroke.<\/p>\n More clinical trials are needed to verify the benefits of targeted vitamin D therapy, both for people who’ve had a heart attack and those who’ve never had one, researchers said.\n<\/p>\n Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.<\/p>\n More information<\/b><\/p>\n
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